In my previous newsletter, I suggested trying out saying to yourself “What else can I enjoy right now,” repeatedly, until it becomes an unconscious mantra. That directs your attention toward what you can enjoy (rather than the gripes and problems that so often occupy our attention, and make us feel bad). But there is another aspect that becomes apparent if you compare it with a similar statement, “What can I enjoy right now,” which has a much weaker effect. The latter statement implies that you aren’t enjoying anything right now (even though that is not a logical consequence of the statement), while the “else” in the former question presupposes that you are ALREADY enjoying something.

Now for this month’s quickie: Everyone knows how a song or jingle can get “stuck” in your head, playing endlessly, and often annoyingly. Why not use this ability in a positive way? Think of some song that already has a positive effect on you, and deliberately sing it to yourself over and over, until it becomes an unconscious background. One of my favorites is “I’m sitting on the top of the world.” Another, sung by Rita Coolidge, I have forgotten the title of, but the lyrics go, “You can do whatever, you want to do whatever, you want to, and you’ll never die.” Singing a song that elicits a state that you find useful or uplifting is a great way to establish and maintain a mood, and it can also change your mood when you’re “down.” Sometimes when I first sing a song that is very different from my current mood, it seems artificial, or I have tears resulting from the conflicting moods, but quickly the song takes over and my mood changes. I think one factor in its power is that the words primarily activate the left hemisphere, while the melody activates the right one at the same time.

Following amputation of a limb, paralysis, or other interruption of sensory nerves, people often feel pain. Interventions directed at the sensory input have been ineffective or have even made the pain worse; newer approaches have been directed at eliciting motor output instead. Here is thepart of an article that I found most interesting:

“Evidence that stimulation of the motor cortex (the area that controls movement) can reduce phantom limb pain has been around for some time. Perhaps more surprising was a trial by Ramachandran and Rogers-Ramachandran in 1996. They asked people with amputations of the arm and phantom limb pain to place their arms inside amirror box so that they saw their remaining arm mirror-reversed to look like their amputated one. When they moved their remaining arm in the box they were ‘fooled’ into thinking they were moving their amputated one, and their pain was reduced. Although this has proved less effective in some subsequent trials, it did suggest that phantom limb pain might reflect a loss of motor control to the limb, as well as loss of sensory input from it.

“More recently the mirror box has been used with some success in pain that is not due to sensory loss. In fact, a box may not be required. In phantom limb pain due to a peripheral nerve injury (brachial plexopathy), Giraux and Sirigu have shown that merely training patients to imagine their paralysed arms moving in relation to a moving arm on a screen in front of them can relieve phantom limb pain.”

Presumably this imagery stimulates motor output to reorganize the cortex, reducing the pain, a strong example of how imagery can have a physiological effect.

This process is described in an article in the Economist (July 22, 2006), p 75, and is also described in a Wikipedia article.